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carelessly, standing about. The studios were forbidden territory. Not only did I squash the artists’ paint tubes empty, I was obviously quite capable of scoffing their linseed oil and turpentine.
    A ‘handful’ is what I was considered, and handfuls such as I had to be dealt with firmly.
    But no one had much time to deal with me, so, apart from being locked out of all the Uncles’ rooms, I was pretty well left on my own to play about in the garden and feed my sister with pebbles or anything else which came to hand. And, of course, got another walloping. People simply did not understand that I was being kind.
    Some of these fragments I remember with intense clarity. Others less well. Memory, as far back as this, is rather like archaeology. Little scraps and shards are collected and put together to form a whole by dedicated people – in this case my parents – who filled in the sprawling design of my life at that early age, and made real the pattern.
    Aunt Kitty’s room, for example, I can see as a vague, shadowy place filled with sweet scents and the trembling shapes of feathers and handkerchiefs flickering high on the ceiling. And I remember the gold-and-black striped divan, for it was to become my own many years later, when we moved to the cottage. Equally I remember the polar-bear rug. It was the first time that I had dared to place a timid hand within the roaring mouth: for the simple reason that Aunt Kitty had assured me it would not bite. It did not. I trusted her from then on, implicitly.
    I trusted everyone in sight. Unwisely.
    I can remember the great spills of cloth, but not the stories of camels and Araby or the scarlet birds swooping across opal skies. These items were added much later by my parents – who had, doubtless, heard her recount them. But I do remember the worms; and the million it took to make a tiny scrap of glowing material. However, most of those very early years are simply the shards and scraps. Vivid none the less.
    But from five years old onwards I have almost total recall: although I rather think that Elizabeth, with a feminine mind, has a far greater memory for detail than I.
    Telegraph Sunday Magazine,
18 March 1984

Years of Innocence
    My father grew restless in the grey-yellow brick house and decided that he wanted to move out to a quieter area. He suffered from catarrh; and also from hideous nightmares, which his experiences only a few years before on the Somme and at Passchendaele had engendered.
    These of course I knew nothing about. Sudden shouts in the night, I can remember those – and my mother’s anxious, caring face the following morning as he set off to his work at
The Times,
where he had become the first Art Editor at an absurdly young age.
    So we moved away from the grey street in West End Lane, Hampstead, into a small but pleasant house among fields just outside Twickenham. It was the talk of the family, and of its friends, that the sale was a ‘snip’. He had bought it extremely cheaply for some reason, and everyone was amazed. The reason was soon to become apparent.
    One morning the dirt road in front of the house began shuddering with trucks and lorries of all descriptions; they droned and rumbled all day long, and when they left in the late evening we discovered the fields before us, and around us, stuck with scarlet wooden stakes and draped about with sagging ropes. My anguished father discovered too late that he had purchased a house in the exact centre of an enormous building development – which was the reason why it had been, as everyone said, ‘so ridiculously’ cheap. A ‘snip’.
    We were buried among bricks, lime, cement and piles of glossy scarlet tiles. The road was churned into a mud-slide and the windows rattled all day with thudding trucks.
    Within the year the fields in front had yielded up a row of semi-detached villas, with bay windows and Tudor gables, theirroofs, as yet untiled, looking like